Thursday, May 20, 2004

In 1966, as it was starting to become apparent that the whole Vietnam
thing was something of a problem, Senator George Aiken proposed
that the United States' best way out of the mess was to declare
victory and, well... he talked about "de-escalation" and "gradual
redeployment of forces", but it's usually glossed as "declare victory
and withdraw."

I've suggested myself a couple
of times
now that we might want to consider that idea in our current fight --
but last week, the (conservative) David Brooks did me one better,
arguing that it would be irresponsible of us to withdraw before we
have arranged a political, if not a military, defeat:

Now, looking ahead, we face another irony. To earn their own freedom,
the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to
have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory
over us. If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the
toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one
sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American
occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to
succeed in Iraq, we have to lose.

That means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to
have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only
anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the
hearts of Iraqi patriots.

Now fast-forward to today's news of police
raids on the home of former neocon pet Ahmad Chalabi, and even
some of Josh Marshall's well-connected sources are apparently wondering
whether this isn't some kind of slick neocon plot to put the plan Brooks
described into effect, setting up Chalabi to lead the resistance against
us. (Brooks does have access to at least some of the thinking of the
administration's neocon faction, through personal connections; I'd
describe him as a neoconservative himself -- he's coauthored articles
with William Kristol -- except that in another widely
lampooned Times column, he tried to deny that neoconservatives
exist).

Marshall's gut says that it's not a likely theory:

Something quite that orchestrated would, I suspect, be far too
difficult to pull-off. And are we dealing here with smooth operators?
Answers itself, doesn't it?

To which I might add that the neocon Project for a New American
Century is about more than just conquering
establishing a friendly regime in Iraq, though they were plotting that
much in the late '90s -- it's about establishing America as the
globe's unique hegemon, unchallenged and impregnable. It's about our
reputation as much as anything we actually do. And so it's hard to
imagine these guys actually choosing to deliberately drop trou and get
our butts kicked -- even if that would leave the Iraqis better off.

And as to the factions in the administration other than
the neocons, well, by all reliable accounts they hate Chalabi's guts.

In the end, I'm somewhat reminded of a time a couple of years ago
(my, how time flies) when Dubya had kind of embarassed himself by
first calling Ariel Sharon a "man of peace", enraging the Saudis, then
took a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, emerging with praise for him and a few sharp
words for the Israelis. As I noted
at the time:

It would be easy to lampoon this as the Rodney King school of foreign
policy --- "We're all men of peace here. We're all good folks. Can't
we all just get along?"

But Bush's defenders on the net say this would be misleading. The true
Bush diplomatic strategy, they claim, is deep and complex, and cannot
be understood by simply taking the administration's public positions
at face value. It is an elaborate series of bluffs, feints, and jabs,
a kind of diplomatic blindfold chess, at once treacherous and
Machiavellian in its methods, and nobly Jeffersonian in its outlook
and aspirations --- which just happens to require, at this point in
time, in service of its recondite tactics, that the President appear
to be a dim-witted rube who agrees with whatever he most recently
heard from anyone with a manly voice and a firm handshake.